schwit1 writes: New data shows that the “vanishing” of polar ice is not the result of runaway global warming

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official
temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than
the actual data justified.

If you do a lot of sysadmin work, choose a topic that interests you, and find some kind of chart or table or data set that you would like to memorize. For example, you could choose capital cities and states, countries and their capitals, wire gauge to diameter, etc.

After a while of using that password each time, you will be able to remember all kinds of esoteric table data and amaze your friends at cocktail parties when you can recite the capital of every country on the globe, or what year many famous scientists were born.

Since you have to spend the effort remembering data, why not make the data something useful that you would like to remember for other applications?

Joe McIntosh writes "Hibiki Kono just might be a boy genius. The 13-year-old decided he wanted to climb vertical surfaces like his hero, Spiderman. So, he used two 1,400-watt recycled vacuum cleaners and a little bit of elbow grease to make a machine that allows him to scale walls. Kono has been scaling the walls of his UK school and has told the media that he hopes his invention will help window washers eliminate clumsy ladders from their daily routine."

Posted
by
timothyon Friday May 28, 2010 @08:51PM
from the back-from-the-living-dead dept.

Luyseyal writes "I unwittingly bought one of these terrible flash cards at Fry's and have managed to nuke two of them, successively. I have a USB flash card reader that will read/write the current one at USB 1.0 speed, but it locks up every Ubuntu and XP machine I've come across in high-speed access mode. I have read that if I low-level format it that it could be fixed, though my current one doesn't support it. My Google-fu must be weak because I cannot seem to find a USB flash reader that specifies that it will do low-level formatting." Can anyone offer advice for resurrecting such drives?

An anonymous reader writes: Krebsonsecurity.com looks at a fiendish new twist on phishing attacks that uses javascript to swap out the content on an open (but presently not in view) Web browser tab, so that an apparently benign page later morphs into a bogus login page for Gmail, Facebook or whatever credentials the attacker is after. The idea is to trick the user into thinking they've been logged out of their account by including the proper favicons and whatnot in the tab for the fake site, so that when he returns to that tab he will ignore whatever Web address is in the URL field and simply see the familiar logo and login page and provide his credentials to log in. Firefox's creative lead Aza Raskin has a proof-of-concept attack on his Web site: If you browse to it with Firefox and leave it open long enough, tab away and then come back, it will have changed to an image of Gmail's login page. Raskin says this technique takes advantage of what he calls “the perceived immutability of tabs," and could be made more dangerous when combined with other browser hacks, such as CSS history attacks.Link to Original Source

Posted
by
samzenpuson Thursday May 20, 2010 @09:52AM
from the geekgirls-geekgirls-you're-both-pretty dept.

bennyboy64 writes "Two prominent women in the Australian IT industry are in a bitter dispute over the ownership of the trademark 'geekgirl.' A woman attempting to use 'geekgirl' on Twitter told ZDNet that women had been advised by the trademark owner to stop doing so since she owned the trademark for the word. 'She noted her trademark and asked me to stop calling myself a "geekgirl" in general conversation and to cease using the hashtag "#geekgirl" on Twitter,' IT consultant Kate Carruthers said."

Posted
by
samzenpuson Tuesday May 18, 2010 @10:52AM
from the here's-to-you-mrs-robinson dept.

teh31337one writes "Google is refusing to advertise CougarLife, a dating site for mature women looking for younger men. However, they continue to accept sites for mature men seeking young women. According to the New York Times, CougarLife.com had been paying Google $100,000 a month since October. The Mountain View company has now cancelled the contract, saying that the dating site is 'nonfamily safe.'"

Tablets are fun, show-off things that you use to waste time (though just like netbooks, they really suck for gaming). But you can actually get work done on a netbook and a good one will cost you less, too. Sorry, tablet fans, but that's how it is. They may be super cool to you and you think that you paid 500 bucks for a great thing, but you know in your heart that you paid 500 bucks for a goof-off device.

Not unless you count ALL web browsing as a waste, most email, and perhaps reading in general. Let's see, I also have spreadsheets that I keep (and maintain) on my iPad, To Do lists, Keynote presentations (admittedly created on my Mac), a calculator, financial information programs, sketchpad, and a thousand research PDFs (Papers), and yes, games. Sure, I won't be running R on my iPad, but I can easily do my thinking and research on it... And goof-off when I need to.

All in a convenient form-factor, free from the awkward, desktop-inspired keyboard, narrow-view screen, and short battery life of a netbook. Freedom from the desktop/laptop/netbook awkwardness is a feature.

And you do realize that "obscure" and "secret" have different meanings, right?In a usual encryption scheme, the algorithm is public (or possibly obscure) and the key is secret.With physical access to the device however, you can't really do better than obscurity, although some physical devices are really well protected.

They are lying threw their teeth if they say nothing unusual happened. I watched it on fold on my trading platform and it was like 1/2 the market just turned off while computerized trades relentlessly sold to the nonexistent buy side. In the end its likely that the only people who got hurt by this were retail investors who trade with stop-loss or trailing stop-loss orders.

If they put an order in, they do not have my sympathy. They missed out on an opportunity, but they got what they asked for in order to do it.

How is that anybody's fault but their own? Sales don't happen unless the bid and ask prices match.